Reflecting on the reflexive pronoun ‘themself’

Singular they has featured a few times in the lingua-blog world of late, with Motivated Grammar noting its antiquity and Language Hat linking to Language Hippie’s sensible defence of it. On a tangent to this issue, I want to look at the lesser known themself, the status of which I’ve been musing and tweeting about recently:

Just used 'themself' as a reflexive pronoun. It was normal centuries ago; it can be normal again!—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) May 29, 2012

Gill Francis at Macmillan Dictionary Blog posed the question: Is there a case for the pronoun themself? The example she leads with, from a Bristol City Council leaflet, is a good illustration of the gap in standard English which themself would naturally fill. But because the word isn’t standard, people often avoid it. Or it doesn’t occur to them, or it’s strange and they’re unsure if it’s permitted. Et cetera.

Annals of non-restrictive ‘that’

You’ll seldom see that used with a comma to set off a non-restrictive clause. Normally which does this job. (Which is also fine in restrictive clauses, by the way, despite the pseudo-rule that forbids it. The first link explains the terminology.)

My earlier post on non-restrictive that gives an idea of how rare it is, and provides an ambiguous example from Penelope Fitzgerald; I later updated with more clearcut literary examples. This post notes a few more instances of non-restrictive that used in books I recently read and re-read, respectively.

In Everest: Impossible Victory, Peter Habeler writes:

The men struck their Camp VI at 8200 metres, that is well below the place at which Mallory and Irvine were last seen.

And Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media:

The rapid increase of traffic brought in the railway, that accommodated a more specialized form of wheel than the road.

The wheel, that began as extended feet, took a great evolutionary step into the movie theatre.

Habeler’s line is ambiguous: that could either be a relative pronoun (or perhaps a subordinator), used where we would expect to see which; or it could be a demonstrative, which means there’s a comma splice where we would expect a dash or full stop.

You could argue the same for the first McLuhan line, but you’d be on even shakier grounds, I think. My feeling is that these thats are non-restrictive relativizers. I’d be curious to know how you read them.

Link love: language (42)

It’s been more than a month since my last linkfest. Time for another assortment of language-related reading material. (And, at the end, audiovisual.)

Email and texting as “fingered speech”.

Homophones, homonyms and co.: a Venn diagram.

On the multiple meanings of moot and changeling.

The value of editing.

Punning is serious business.

The tension of stacked parentheses.

Grammar and usage myths debunked.

Where does kindly belong?

Scots words in the wild.

A history of Ireland in 100 insults.

On gesture, or, when thought “leaks through our hands.”

Tidbits and titbits.

Proofreading a dictionary.

My life’s sentences.

When language advice misleads.

Marvellous words from Marvel Comics.

Using pronouns to predict dating success.

Headline headghgh: a gallery of dummy text.

The contentious history of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Is “me no likie” racist?

Favourite synonyms and sets of synonyms.

Hopefully: five decades of foolishness (lots more at Copyediting.com).

Tricks used by chatbots to imitate humans.

Linguistics from an evolutionary point of view (PDF).

How blogs and Twitter are changing science writing (talk, 1 hr 11 min.).

[language links archive]

As good (as) or better than faulty parallelism

I read the following in a Discovery News article, and it gave me pause:

Fussy readers will frown at the faulty parallelism of “as much, or more, than…”. After all, we don’t say as much than. Strictly speaking, it would seem a second as is missing: as much as, or more than, the face.

This construction is sometimes called “dual comparison”, and it takes various forms: as good (as) or better than; as well (as) or better than; as bad (as) or worse than – you can add your own adjectives or adverbs to the formula. All are susceptible to the kind of casual ellipsis pictured above.

You may be wondering how acceptable the unparallel forms are: whether they’re OK in semi-formal contexts such as science news websites, for example. Let’s see what usage commentators have to say.

*

Bryan Garner says parallelism “helps satisfy every reader’s innate craving for order and rhythm”. He believes the second as “must appear”, and that dropping it is a “common error”. His appeal is to logic. This is also essentially the argument made by Robert Burchfield, who in his revised edition of Fowler says difficulties arise

because both bad and good (as well as other adjectives) obviously require as, not than, in comparisons. The juxtaposition of as and than without intervening punctuation is not logically defensible. Thus the sentence we’re sure they can judge a novel just as well if not better than us (London Review of Books, 1987) needs correcting to just as well as, if not better than, us.

Burchfield says a wiser course is to sidestep the problem by placing the comparative later in the sentence. So the LRB line could be recast thus: just as well as us, if not better.

But this is not the whole story; other authorities are less stringent. Kenneth G. Wilson’s Columbia Guide to Standard American English says the structure

is idiomatic, at least in Conversational levels and in their written representations, but Edited English avoids it because it is often criticized for its faulty parallelism. . . . Particularly in longer sentences, punctuation gets more complicated when you restore the as: He is as handsome and well-mannered as, or even handsomer and better-mannered than, his older brother.

I don’t see how the punctuation gets more complicated there, though: it’s just the usual two commas in a more unwieldy sentence.

The same source, in a separate entry, says that only crude faulty parallelisms usually bother us: “we speak and write a good many more that go unnoticed.” Unless we have that “craving” Garner mentions, I suppose, along with a meticulous reading and listening style.

The most thorough treatment I came across is in the exceptional Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. It says the objections began (as they so often do) in the 18th century, beginning with George Campbell in 1776, and they have continued ever since:

This issue arises from the 18-century grammarians’ concern with developing a perfectly logical language – logical from the point of view of Latin grammar – and eliminating as many untidy English idioms as possible.

It says the locution might nowadays be considered “simply another idiomatic usage” had Campbell not noticed it, and that it is “a venial fault” since readers are not confused by it. After examining the various ways punctuation can affect the construction, MWDEU concludes that it “need not be routinely revised out of general writing that does not strive for elevation”.

A search on COCA suggests that as good or better than – seemingly the most common of these expressions – appears especially in magazines and newspapers, often as quoted speech. But academic occurrences are not unheard of, and for as well or better than are of comparable frequency. A few examples:

He knew the lawn as well or better than she did (Margaret Edwards, Virginia Quarterly Review, 1993)

they scored as well or better than the Swedes on tests of reproductive and contraceptive knowledge (Public Interest, 1993)

third-party settlement can be as bad or worse than negotiation in encouraging extreme claims and positions (Canada–United States Law Journal, 2000)

CPDT training is as good or better than the pre-service training (Education, 2003)

You can click on the following charts for more information on specific instances.

As good or better than:

As well or better than:

If on the other hand you are striving for elevation, and you want to attend to proper parallelism, you can:

1. Add as and use two commas.

2. Place the comparative later. This was Strunk’s preferred solution: My opinion is as good as his, or better / if not better.

3. Rephrase, e.g., at least as X as Y.

Different styles, tastes, contexts and hunches will call for different solutions, and it’s always good to have options.

Sparsed and cahooted

I encountered two unusual derivations in prominent places last week, and want to note them briefly.

First, Laura Slattery’s Irish Times report (5 April 2012) about investigative journalism by RTÉ, the state broadcaster, contains the following line:

New investigative television documentaries from the unit will be “sparsed throughout the year”, according to RTÉ director general Noel Curran.

The adjective sparse, meaning dispersed or (thinly) scattered, is common enough. It comes from Latin sparsus, past participle of spargere “scatter”. But sparsed is much rarer. The OED dates the participial adjective to the late-16th century and calls it “rare or obsolete”, and the verb sparse to around the same time: M16–E17.

COHA has no matches for sparsed or sparse (v.), which surprised me given their semantic transparency. But the form does appear online; there are other instances of “sparsed throughout”, for example.

*

Nick McGivney on Twitter drew my attention to cahoot (v.), a creative shortening of the phrase be in cahoots, meaning be in partnership, often secretly. On the RTE Radio 1 show Drivetime (4 April 2012, at 1:42:50 approx.), Michael Fitzmaurice of the Irish Turf Cutters and Contractors Association said:

Out of the blue yesterday, both the EU and the Irish government cahooted together and decided, “Naw, we’re not goin’ to let ye cut yeer turf.”*

Cahooted here seems to have been used as a synonym for conspired or colluded, but perhaps with slightly different connotations in the speaker’s idiolect. Cahoot(s) (n.) first appeared as U.S. slang, possibly from French cahute (cabin, hut) or cohorte.

I found no evidence of the verb cahoot on COHA either, though again it appears informally online; Wiktionary has an example from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “our leaders were lying, tricking and cahooting with Halliburton”. But the usage is sparse.

.

* yeer means your (plural) and was formed from ye by analogy with your. Both ye and yeer are common in colloquial Hiberno-English.

“Who to follow” is grammatically fine

As far as I’m concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler. (Calvin Trillin)

Who am I writing for? (William Zinsser, On Writing Well)

Twitter has a feature called Who to follow that suggests other users you might be interested in. I haven’t paid it much attention yet, but I’m interested in the fact that the phrase is censured by people who think it should be Whom to follow. There’s even a Chrome extension that “corrects” it.

Did I say even? I should have saved that for the Grand Order of the Whomic Empire, which solicits “moral support for those people who work tirelessly to bring whom back into everyday circulation”. I fear their quest is not entirely tongue-in-cheek.

Anyway: Who to follow. Let’s see what its critics say.

Business Insider thinks it’s “bad English”. GalleyCat calls it “one of the most viewed and easily overlooked grammar mistakes on the Internet”, adding that it’s “reassuring to watch a major social network struggle” with grammatical rules. Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU, believes it’s a “grammatical error”:

Notes on standard English and “bad grammar”

The particular English dialect that began to be adopted as standard more than half a millennium ago came from the UK, mostly the region encompassing London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

This part of the country was the hub of society, politics and education at the time, serving also as a bridge between northern and southern modes of expression. In Our Language, Simeon Potter writes that the East Midland dialect “had assumed an acknowledged ascendancy”.

According to David Crystal‘s The English Language, the clinching factor was William Caxton, who established his printing press in Westminster in 1476 and used the speech of the London area “as the basis for his translations and spelling”. By the end of the 15th century,

the distinction between ‘central’ and ‘provincial’ life was firmly established. It was reflected in the distinction between ‘standard’ and ‘regional’ speech — the former thought of as correct, proper, and educated, the latter as incorrect, careless, and inferior — which is still with us today.

From then on, standard English gradually secured its status as a prestige dialect in the English-speaking world. It was taught by educators guided by grammar books and dictionaries, to spread and sustain a (more or less) common set of norms in spelling, grammar and usage; the process continues today, overseen by editors and other authorities.

In ‘The Rise of Prescriptivism in English’ (PDF), Shadyah A. N. Cole says that before 1650, “tolerance with variation in language abounded”. Subsequently it was felt that the use of the language should be “regularized, standardized, codified, and unified”. Eventually:

As a result of the slowing of changes in pronunciation and other linguistic changes, the influence of the printing press, and spelling reformers, written English now had a form that varies only a little from what is current today.

Today, many people use standard English when circumstances demand, and default to other registers the rest of the time. Or rather: they use a form of standard English — it’s not as uniform and definitive as the name might suggest, and there is no little variation in the standards that obtain in different countries and contexts.

Still, there’s no mistaking the non-standard quality of lines like the following, though they are fully suited to the context in which they are naturally expressed:

Your Aunt Edith seen it happen and run out and drug him in.

‘Fine view,’ I said, ‘iffi’n only that barn warn’t there…’

There’s people got so much faith they can believe what ain’t…

Somebody said as how the town ought to clean Ogilby’s statue — become plumb pigeonfied last few years.

These are from Robert Arthur’s short story ‘Obstinate Uncle Otis’, which I read last week in Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery anthology. As you might guess, the story’s regional language, far from diminishing my reading experience, hugely enhanced it.

Yet a practice exists of censuring non-standard words, pronunciations, and grammatical forms. The internet abounds in sneers at variant usage. Even reputable news outlets publish articles that pour scorn on particular speech patterns; readers are tacitly or explicitly invited to join in, which they enthusiastically do.

So you’d be forgiven for supposing that standard English is inherently better: more logical, consistent, robust and so on. Not so: it’s riddled with illogic and inconsistency. Kory Stamper recently said that the language is “a lovely, powerful mess”, and this is as true of standard English as any other variety.

Here is a pertinent passage from one of my favourite books on writing and language, Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

. . . we ought to rethink the widely shared notion that every feature of standard English has some kind of self-evident, naturally determined “logic” that makes it intrinsically superior to its corresponding form in nonstandard English. In educated written English intended for general circulation, ain’t is socially “wrong.” But we ought not try to convince ourselves or anyone else that ain’t — along with most other errors of its kind — is wrong because it is inherently defective and is therefore evidence of an inherently defective mind. Such errors are “wrong” because of historically accidental reasons. Until we recognize the arbitrary nature of our judgments, too many of us will take “bad” grammar as evidence of laziness, carelessness, or a low IQ. That belief is not just wrong. It is socially destructive.

In ‘Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory’ (PDF), Geoffrey Pullum writes:

Unjustified and perhaps unjustifiable, the rules of the prescriptive ideologues, dimly grasped and often misunderstood, nonetheless form the backbone of what the general public understands and believes about English grammar. . . .
It is a familiar pattern for people to reify an unjustifiable set of regulative rules that are supported mainly by the taste of the person making the proposal, to treat them as if they were the constitutive correctness conditions for some language that people do not speak but should, and to call that language English.

Standard English, though a minority dialect, enjoys an exalted position in the family of English dialects. But this is a matter of historical happenstance. Socially privileged it may be, linguistically superior it is not. Variation makes communication more interesting, and it can be savoured rather than disdained.

Update:

Language Hat has a good discussion of some of the issues raised in this post.